War and the Word Cloud

An alleged “nuclear weapons” site in Syria
has been revealed to be a textile factory – and another of the War
Party’s tall tales is debunked. To those of a skeptical mindset –
i.e., nearly anyone outside of Washington – this throws fresh doubt
on the claim that the Israeli raid on a supposed Syrian nuclear weapons
facility at Deir ez Zour, in 2007, destroyed anything more dangerous
than an empty warehouse.

The War Party doesn’t give
up quite so easily, however: now we are being told that the International
Atomic Energy Administration (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear watchdog agency,
has a new report coming out with satellite photos of a supposed nuclear
facility in Iran – just as in the case of the two Syrian sites.

Get out your bullshit detector,
press the “on” button, and watch it light up like a fourth of July fireworks display.

This latest “evidence”
of a nuclear threat emanating from the general direction of Iran and
its allies is based on “leaks” supposedly coming out of the IAEA:
we don’t even have the actual report, and yet there is a concerted
campaign to create the impression that the “evidence” is conclusive.
By the time we get to see what is really in the IAEA’s dossier, the
Iranians are judged to be guilty no matter what it says.

And, of course, it’s just
a coincidence that, right at this very moment, the US Justice Department
is accusing an alcoholic used car salesman of being at the center of
an alleged Iranian plot to carry out terrorist activities – including
bombing a restaurant and assassinating the Saudi ambassador – in Washington,
D.C.

Of course it is. To
believe otherwise is to indulge in “conspiracy theories.”

Frantic and grasping at straws,
the War Party is flinging as much ordure at the wall as it can muster,
hoping that at least some of it will stick. As any propagandist worth
his salt will tell you, the propagation of a lie, no matter how many
times it’s debunked [.pdf], is a useful exercise. As the complexity of the
allegations – involving technical questions requiring scientific expertise
– grow, a general impression is created: a “word cloud” that hangs
over the intended target, and rationalizes military action in spite
of the completely bogus nature of the charges.

It’s volume over verification
simply because the public has neither the time nor the inclination to
look too closely at the evidence. That’s our
job, here at Antiwar.com, but there’s just one big problem: the faster
we debunk their lies, the faster the War Party comes up with new ones.
A veritable deluge of deception pours forth from their propaganda mills
24/7 – and they have tremendous resources at their disposal.

Yet the militarists have an even bigger problem, these days, and that is the
growing de-legitimization of government in the eyes of the American
public. A recent poll has a whopping 80 percent distrusting the federal
government and all its pronouncements and works. As in the case of the
old Soviet order, people simply assume, from the get-go, that everything
the authorities tell us is a lie – and that goes for the “mainstream”
media as well, which is seen as nothing more than Washington’s sounding
board.

This rising anti-government
mindset is not purely the result of economic conditions. Although being
broke often inspires clarity, that’s not why Americans are in what
the elites condescendingly describe as a “cranky” mood – as if they were referring to the
moods of a spoiled child. What’s really making Americans angry is
the growing feeling that everything they thought they once knew
as true was and is a lie.

They thought the myth of America’s
invulnerable prosperity was real: they took it as a matter of faith
that the march of progress was inevitable and the path of human and
economic development went ever-upward and onward. Their sense of entitlement
is offended – nay, violated – by the events of the past few years.
They look at Greece and are shocked to realize that what we call civilization
hangs by a very thin thread.

They thought the system rewarded
merit, and that “free enterprise” meant rising or falling on one’s
own effort. Then they watched, in disbelief, as the “too big to fail”
were bailed out, and the “too small to care about” were dumped over
the side and left to sink or swim.

They never thought they’d
live to see the day when we had socialism for the rich, and capitalism
for the poor – and yet that’s the Bizarro World political system
we are living under. Plutocratic socialism – only in America!

To wake up, one dull gray morning,
to the knowledge that you’ve been wrong about everything, and that
the entire social and political edifice of American society is an elaborate
fabrication, is a life-shattering experience. What is unique
about the present moment is that we are experiencing it collectively,
as a people.

This makes our job at Antiwar.com
much easier, as you might imagine. I just wish we didn’t have to pay
the social and personal costs of acquiring this advantage. Because the
costs will be high indeed – so high that we may have to pay for it
with our blood.

This country is headed for
a social and political explosion. The idea that we can maintain an overseas
empire when, on the home front, our rulers are facing the prospect of revolution, is the very height of hubris. The last time
a revolutionary movement held out the promise of “bread and peace,”
somewhere around the year 1917, there was trouble aplenty, and we all
know how that turned out.

If I were the Powers That Be,
I would start pulling troops out of Korea and Germany now,
before the mobs gathering in city centers all around the country get
much bigger. Because they’re going to be needing them right here at
home.

In the days before the Crash
of ’08, there were discussions among our leaders about how to provide
for food distribution when the economic meltdown they expected took
down the supply lines. No doubt they are making similar plans for the
next seismic financial event, the next lurch downward into the abyss
of Depression – or are they? In any case, a key part of that plan
has got to be ensuring a level of security so that emergency measures
can be taken. At that point, a number of scenarios kick in – will
it be Seven
Days in May,
or On
the Beach?
– which are better left to another column, or series of columns. Suffice
to say here that the Empire is on its last legs, no matter which of
these plays out.

This is not something to be
celebrated. Empires can fall gracefully, with minimum damage to the
imperial power – but only if they are dismantled quite deliberately,
rather than simply lost. Because losing implies a fight to retain it,
a battle that slowly (or rapidly) drains the very lifeblood out of us.
The political class has no intentions of relinquishing its vaunted role
as the World’s Sole Superpower, and so what we are in for is a ruinous
and protracted implosion that pulverizes the social order and flattens
longstanding political institutions. What’s left is a void, an enormous
vacuum waiting to be filled – but with what?

I’m not betting the new order
will be an improvement.

Back in the old days, at the
very dawn of the 1960s, when the libertarian movement was just a collection
of isolated groups united by a plethora of political fanzines, I remember
seeing an advertisement in one of them – the
Innovator
– for a bumper sticker that read: “Save your candles, the Dark Ages
are coming.”

If we are entering the last
days of the American Empire, then the non-interventionist movement has
nothing to cheer about. Its decline is likely to be just as bloody as
its ascent, and even more deleterious to the inhabitants of the Imperial
Megalopolis. If this is a victory, then it is truly a Pyrrhic one.

NOTES IN THE MARGIN

The advance of “on demand”
publishing and the ubiquity of the Internet have given rise to a new
racket, one that combines high technology with a penchant for piracy
to produce the phenomenon of “zombie” publishing. What this means
is that dubious “publishers” troll the Internet for “content” and package
it as an authorized edition of a writer’s works. Some of these racketeers
simply collect material about someone-or-other, and then slap it between
the covers of a “book.” Others, the outright thieves in their ranks,
collect copyrighted material and publish it without authorization.

I am the latest victim of this
unethical and illegal practice: there are at least three such pseudo-books
out there that feature my name on the cover which are not authorized
by me and are not to be considered part of my works. I am still looking
into this matter, and I’ll have more details as they become available,
but until then I want to state for the record that the only books authorized
by me are:

This is in addition to a couple
of pamphlets published by the Center for Libertarian
Studies and America First Books in the 1990s.

I want to put my readers on
notice that any book or publication with my name on the cover other
than the above is not authorized by me, and I cannot vouch
for either the content or the publisher.

These “publishers” who
scoop up “content” on the Internet and offer it for sale – at
ridiculous prices, I might add – are nothing more than common thieves.
Please do not contribute to this larceny, and refrain from purchasing
any such books other than those authorized by me and listed above. If
and when I get the time to write another book, and actually manage to
get it into print, you’ll be informed of it in this space. Until that
happy event, the list above is my official œuvre in its entirety.

Author: Justin Raimondo

Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com, and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute. He is a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and writes a monthly column for Chronicles. He is the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement [Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000], and An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard [Prometheus Books, 2000].
View all posts by Justin Raimondo